Volkin

Working across painting and material abstraction, she layers acrylic and oil with natural sand, stone and fibres, bringing the physical substance of the landscape into the work and blurring the boundary between image and relief.

At the heart of her work is the idea of landscape as memory. Drawing philosophical resonance from the ancient understanding of Australia’s First Peoples that Country is sustained through story, memory and an enduring relationship with place, Volkin carries this idea into her own contemporary visual language. The coast is not simply depicted, but remembered: its sand, stone and shifting waters becoming a physical record of a place continually shaped and erased by time.

Seen from above, the familiar moves towards abstraction. Distance changes the landscape into form, while texture brings it close enough to almost touch. In this tension between seeing and feeling, Volkin seeks to preserve something more than the image of a place: a memory of the shore, held in material, for the world to remember.